Night Lily: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Sanjana Pandit (2012)

Our second assignment in Design was our Illustration Project where we had to choose one trait we poses and express it as our best and worst trait in symbolic terms. Stephen Hawking's famous quote: ''Quiet people have the loudest minds'' is a perfect depiction of my how worst trait also happens to be my best trait. I chose to create my illustration based off of my shyness, because it prevents me from meeting new people and trying new things, yet it also allows me to have a loud mind filled with a ton of different and unique thoughts and ideas. My shyness doesn't allow me to share these ideas, forcing me to keep them to myself and later they come in handy for a project or some sort of assignment, which is beneficial. In my illustration, I represented this trait through a flower called the Night Bloom Water Lily, which is one of the few flowers that open up at night. This process is parallel to my shyness and how I only open up when I'm comfortable to do so. Coming out of this flower are crazy, abstract shapes and forms, which are a visual representation of what goes on in my mind, that my shyness doesn't allow me to express. These abstract ideas allow me to succeed and think differently than others.

For this illustration piece, we used a program called Adobe Illustrator CS6. After finalizing our idea for this illustration, we started to use this program and play with the different tools and discover various techniques. When actually starting to create my image, I found out that Illustrator was one of the most challenging programs I have ever used and I often got extremely frustrated when using it. I had trouble tracing the flower and became frustrated when creating the various shapes sprouting out of the flower. I also struggled with creating an appealing composition for my illustration and the placement of certain objects in order to satisfy my overall image. Persevering through all these technical obstacles made me even more satisfied with my overall illustration.